Ohio Kidnapper Ariel Castro Found Dead In His Cell

You probably remember back in May we brought you the story of when three women who had been missing for over ten years in Ohio finally escaped from their captor Ariel Castro’s house thanks to the help of their neighbour Charles Ramsey. For all intents and purposes Ramsey probably conducted the television interview of the year when describing how he helped them escape.

Since then the full horror of the ordeal that the three women – Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight – endured for ten years has been revealed to the press during Ariel Castro’s trial and well, it’s been pretty grim reading/listening. In case you hadn’t heard Ariel Castro was charged with literally HUNDREDS (937 to be exact) of counts related to rape, kidnapping and murder. Some of the more sickening of these charges concerned when he impregnated some of the women several times and then starved and beat them until they miscarried which is just…..there are no words.

During his trial in July, Castro plead guilty to all of these crimes, describing himself as a porn addict who was also a very sick man. No shit dude but I don’t think that gives you a free pass to do ANYTHING approaching what you did. The verdict was a foregone conclusion and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole plus an additional 1000 years in prison, which probably still isn’t a harsh enough sentence for what he actually did.

Last night at approximately 9.30pm Castro was found hanging in his cell. Prison staff performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation before he was transported to a nearby medical facility but doctors were unable to save him (if they were even trying) and he was pronounced dead at 10:52pm that night.

There is some debate as to whether he was actually on suicide watch or just under protective custody – some publications are saying different versions of events but it seems like he definitely SHOULD have been on suicide watch considering he even wrote a suicide not and displayed suicidal tendencies – but either way he was being checked on every 30 minutes so someone probably should have managed to find him hanging before he died.

Protective custody just means that you have to be checked on every 30 minutes in case one of the inmates has decided to kill you because your crimes were so sick that even other prisoners are disgusted by them. I’m not sure how suicide watch works because I just read LostProphets frontman Ian Watkins is on suicide watch in his prison and is only being checked on five times a day which kind of perplexes me – I guess they maybe have different policies in America though. To me though it seems more important to keep watch of a suicidal person than someone who may be attacked as it’s a lot easier to commit suicide than to be attacked as it only requires one person?

I’m no expert in prison rules though, I’ve just seen a few episodes of Oz.

Whether or not his death is actually a problem probably depends on your thoughts on life in prison or the death penalty. Ultimately, I think it’s definitely more of a punishment to play out the rest of your life behind bars than to be killed – this is going to happen anyway and the depression of knowing that that’s all you’ve got to look forward to must be excruciating – so I think Castro got off easy. On the flipside of this his death will save a lot of government resources and money as he will they’ll no longer have to dedicate them to his upkeep in prison and his security deal.

I think that’s a small price to pay though for Castro getting the punishment he deserves. In fact what he was getting wasn’t even what he deserved – it was way more lenient. He got off easy and should have been made to fulfil his life + 1000 years in prison sentence rather than spending just over one month there. That’s roughly about 1% of the time that each of his victims had to endure, and he wasn’t even getting raped and beaten up every day, although he deserved to be. Castro was a sack of shit and I’m glad he’s gone, but like so many of these incidents it really illustrates why life just isn’t fair when people like him get the easy way out.

Victim Michelle Knight spoke at Castro’s sentencing and said that ‘I spent 11 years in hell and now your hell is just beginning. I will overcome all this has happened, but you will face hell for eternity.’ It sucks for her more than anyone that his hell only lasted a month, although we can all hope that if the Devil does exist he reserved an extra special section of hell for him.